Fractions of Life
by sakurasencha
Summary: "She sacrificed herself to save me, and I didn't even know her name." They called her a morphling in life, but that's not how she'll be remembered in death.


_This was written for the "last words" contest on the Caeser's Palace forums, wherein we had to highlight a characters final words before death. Well, I had this idea for awhile so I decided to run with it. It's a bit of an abbreviated fic, because there was a suggested word count (which I went way over, sorry!) and it's not really a story idea I have the time or inclination to draw out anyway._

_Many thanks to Estoma for the beta._

_Warnings for a few depictions of violence and drug use._

* * *

**Fractions of Life**

A knife rests in her hand. A bleeding boy lies at her feet. Coursing adrenaline propels the first into the second, into the center of his heaving chest. A welling fountain stains her fingers and wrists, deep red like summer cherries. The color, vibrant and beautiful in its richness, cries out to her; but she ignores its call to grit her teeth and sink the blade in further, into the pit of his flesh till it splits a bone and fatty tissue inflames into a pink, bulbous mass that looks to be swallowing her hand.

The heaving stops.

A single cannon booms.

"Congratulations! You have just won The 54th Hunger Games!"

* * *

Drowsiness nips at her heels. She fights to stay awake, desperately flees from the abyss of slumber that subjects her to utter blackness, a complete absence of light that forces her color–tuned mind to conjure its own hues and shades, its own rambling images, frequently borrowing from her memories – which had never before been a problem, except now they are perpetually populated by twenty–three distinct faces, or rather twenty–three indistinct corpses: splotches of brown hair matted in blood, three heads the color of grain no longer attached to their bodies. Parted lips chilled to a dark azure. A once pale yellow skin now charred to a blackened crisp.

The only face she never sees within the churning, horror-tinged swirl is her own, the one out of twenty–four that remains intact.

Alive.

The victor.

* * *

When clarity chances upon her she opens her eyes to a room starkly white, catatonic in its blandness and sameness, and trimmed all over in hard, grey steel that glints menacingly from mirror to sink to the surgical blades that lay like long, sharpened teeth on a tray by her bed.

A rotation of doctors and nurses hover close by. They provide the occasional bursts of color, tangerine eyebrows that rise dramatically above one of the nurses' snowy facemasks.

"She needs to be restrained! Orderlies!"

Confused by the outburst and the sudden surge of large bodies into the room, she glances down. Seeping crimson blooms from a row of long, jagged lines clawed into the tanned skin of either arm. Large hands assail her, attempt to control her. She struggles. Rivulets of red snake down her arms and pool into her lap like a bowl of silken rose petals.

She watches the blood cleared and cleaned, her wrists tightly bound. A bruise swells near the bend of her elbow. A gauzy light never seen before permeates her vision. She smiles, because for the first time in a month she no longer feels even a sliver of pain.

"It's the morphling," one of the buzzing nurses explains.

She glances at the insertion site. Inside the transparent, winding tubing taped to her arm she sees a running liquid, clear and diaphanous, providing texture rather than color, but just as necessary to the palette. She can't see the drug as it enters her bloodstream, but as her smile widens and her eyelids droop she imagines the slow _drip drip_ of the needle, the morphling mixing, intoxicating her blood, replacing midnight nightmares with a twisting kaleidoscope of shapes and color.

She no longer fears the grip of sleep. She closes her eyes and rests.

* * *

Popping flashes of light, ubiquitous camera crews decked from head to toe in chunky gear follow her every step. Her bubblegum pink lips smile, often and on cue, like a painted wind up doll, at necessary intervals her prep team and stylist rewinding the key. "Another dose. She _needs_ another dose. I don't care about 'doctor's orders,' she'll never get through the interview without _another! Dose!_"

At the interview, the highlights reel is emblazoned across seventy-two mounted screens. Each death replays three times in high definition. Numbers one through six in the bloodbath. Matthias, her district partner, number twelve, drowned by the girl from Four. Eighteen tried to nick food from the careers and received an axe through her skull for her trouble. Twenty-one stumbled over a trip wire set up by an industrious girl with a specialized knowledge of combustibles (and who would later describe the trap in detail to a frothing audience as their illustrious victor) and was set instantly ablaze.

The final death they showcase in slow motion while she provides invaluable commentary.

"But the people are simply _demanding_ to know how you thought of that trap for Sapphire!" The audience roars. Caesar Flickerman stands and opens his arms to the crowd. "Right? Right?"

_Sapphire_, she thinks. _The boy with a hole in his chest_. Number twenty-two.

She smiles. "Well, after the fire trap, I knew I couldn't use the same trick twice." She taps her temple. "It's all about misdirection. I noticed he was clever, cautious. So I set up one path with signs of life, made it look _dangerous_." She accentuates the word, says it low and sexy and the crowd absolutely loses it. She laughs loudly over the cacophony, "And he ran _straight_ into the other!" _Where a flying hatchet was waiting for him._

Caesar's purple lips split into a grin.

"And we all know what happened _there_." He laughs. "Am I right, folks? Am I right? But really – what drama! What a finish!" His demeanor suddenly shifts. His brows grow moody and the audience quiets. He rests his chin over steepled fingers. "Now tell me, in all seriousness – how does it feel to be the victor?"

She cocks her head and dwells on twenty-three deaths. She considers the small fraction of survivors.

_One. _

_Victor_.

"Well Caesar…" To keep from crumbling she reminds herself of the morphling waiting in a septum-capped jar back in her room, of half a dozen thirsty needles. "It feels great!"

* * *

Just as the other eleven districts, District Six sometimes brings home their winners, revels in their glory years. But as a rule they are a losing district, and she finds the Victors' Village to be sparsely populated and uninviting. The area reeks of negligence. Whole blocks are covered in weeds and peeling paint. And the structures themselves are designed as nothing more than boxy, dual-toned monstrosities – bleak grey and bland beige – cookie cutter homes in every way except for their occupants, and even _they_ are only a variation on a theme: a skeletal group that limp around the village with hollowed out eyes and glassy smiles, who haunt the outer edges of the garages and factories like ghosts trying to peek in on the living.

But this is her home now. So she acquiesces. She moves in, settles. She confines herself to her room, which she repaints every weekend. One week ago was sage, and twenty-three families are still grieving. This week is indigo, and twenty-three families are minus one.

Next week, she decides, will be mourner's black, on every wall and the ceiling, because twenty-three children might have lived if she hadn't.

* * *

After awhile, the other victors lend their sympathetic ears. "It's not your fault," they tell her. Not her fault that she sometimes wants to scratch every inch of skin off, or that she feels the burden of twenty-three lives like an unrelenting, crushing weight.

They bring her into the fold. "It's not your fault." Blame can be placed, but not on her shoulders, they tell her, and it's not her fault that she never believes them and so gives in to their drugs and plying, once, twice. Five times in one week. Five times in one day. They never run out, she is told, because the base chemicals used to synthesize morphling are frequently used within the industry of transportation. Add to that fact they are all filthy rich with nothing to buy.

It's not her fault that when a moment, a second becomes too difficult to bear, she reaches for the needle.

* * *

Years slip away. One, two, five. She mentors for a time, until another victor from her district arises to take her place, and once those duties are relinquished she nose-dives down the spiral.

Life becomes bearable, easier – almost happy, once the cry of twenty-three voices subsides into a faded echo and she becomes accustomed to the whispering behind her back, growing louder and more incessant with each flying year. "She won't change." – "No use reasoning." – "Can't talk sense into her."

_Interventions._

Old friends and family begin to abandon her. By any normal criteria, they argue, she does nothing. Nothing everyday. And even within her rainbow haze the thought occasionally smacks her that twenty-three lives have now amounted to nothing, nothing, nothing everyday.

She cuts any of those jabs short with a quick flick of a needle and a hypodermic release that makes her body shudder with delight. Once sufficiently distracted by an array of blending colors, the heightened sensitivity to light and sound that turns the entire world into a playground, she can wallow and wonder and do nothing, just as she does everyday, every year, eight, ten, going strong on thirteen, and by year fifteen the results are in:

She is a wasted life.

A wasted win.

* * *

One day, the Victors' Village boasts of a new resident.

They tell her Jake was the brightest kid in his class before that fateful reaping. He arrives, all pinched face and tormented mind, little more than a shell.

Sunning herself on the beach without any perceivable cares, she paints – mango sunrises that burn out her irises with their beauty, halos of grey belching out of the smoke stacks like ascending angels – all the while donning a fragrant smile that radiates warmth, and more importantly _an answer_.

Moths to a flame, bees to pollen; he's naturally drawn to it. "How do you…?"

"What?" she asks dreamily.

"Don't you get nightmares?" He appears upset. He nearly shouts, "How can you be smiling?"

She holds her arms out to him. He collapses inside and she strokes his back, coos lullabies into his ear. She can bring him into the fold, show him the way. "It's not your fault, Jake." And together they can let more years glide by, no memory, no pain, nothing but nothing, everyday, and the infinite color it offers.

* * *

The 75th Hunger Games provides the first shock to her system since she had been plucked from the arena twenty years ago. _The arena_. She is going back to the arena, so declares a two-inch scrap of paper with her name that jolts her into the first coherent thought after twenty years of living in a chemical fog:

"How long do you think we'll last, Jake?"

"We might make it out of the blood bath." He grins. "If we hurry."

"The first rule of The Hunger Games is running fast." Then she laughs, laughs for ages like they've just made a great joke, fat tears rolling down her cheeks.

She laughs because it's true; she cries because Jake had killed no less than four people in his bloodbath when he'd been the first to recognize the grenade. Yes, she remembers, he had once been a sharp one. A deadly one.

Come to think of it, so was she. And she thinks that maybe they'll make it out of the bloodbath after all.

The muzzle of a gun prods her back. "I guess it's time for us to go." She looks disjointedly over the sea of uniform, unfamiliar faces. "But do you know what I'll miss most?"

The minute a score of armed peacekeepers shove them into a boxcar bound for the Capitol, the detox begins.

* * *

A lime green poof of hair pokes through the door, shaking with equal parts frustration and annoyance. "This will _never_ do!" Glossy black fingernails _wag wag_ in their direction, as if detoxing tributes, naked, shivering, and huddled in pools of their own sweat and vomit, were simply another trial to be borne for District Six's young escort.

She easily ignores the prattle. No amount of henpecking or condescension will heal them any faster. Physically, it's torture, her entire body in revolt. Mentally, it's far worse; the blockade has been destroyed, unleashing all her old demons.

But she doesn't mind. It's her due, after all. Doesn't she have decades' worth of pain to catch up on?

After seventy-two hours, she retches for the final time. Stooped over the toilet, she stands up shakily, wipes the filth from her mouth. She washes her face and stares at herself in the mirror. She sees twenty-three young lives all boiled down into one, and has not a single desire to flee.

The chase is over.

* * *

Their mentor, as doped up and featherbrained as District Six has to offer, approaches them with a startling idea and with a startling amount of sobriety.

"The ones from District Twelve," he says quietly, seriously. "The kids who won last year – you're gonna make friends with them."

Jake's struck dumb. "Allies?" he says. They toss each other a look. Neither had expected to _strategize_.

"Why?" she asks. "There's no point, Greg. None at all."

He darts his eyes into the corners where the shifting cameras prowl, then pulls them into the only blindspot the room has to offer. He mouths a single, voiceless word:

"_Mockingjay_."

The switch clicks. Her jaw sets. "We're in."

Jake's eyes widen. "Are you sure?" They're the morphlings, after all. Everyone knows they aren't threats. No one would blame them for crawling into some corner of the arena to slowly die. "We don't have to –"

She cuts him off with a firm hand. "We're _in_."

* * *

Training teaches her just how rusty her mind has become.

She can't balance a blade on the tip of her finger as she used to. Forget about stringing together intricate death traps. In fact, she doesn't bother with any station but camouflage, where she paints herself and anyone with range of her brush as brightly and conspicuously as possible. Because even with a good share of her brain cells burned away, she'll always have this, that third eye which sees shapes and colors before they appear, the ability to bring them life and substance.

One afternoon, a golden haired boy ventures into her circle and proffers his pale arms as her newest canvass. _District Twelve._ She smiles when she hands him a brush and he paints her right back.

"An artist?" she asks.

"A baker."

She laughs. "Even better."

* * *

Jake dies fast, and she isn't surprised.

Between them, they concocted a plan. They'd flee the bloodbath, be on the lookout for Katniss and Peeta, then trail the pair. The experts at hiding in plain sight, they would keep themselves close by and unobservable, the invisible guardians circling their camp like smoke off a fire.

But Jake dies on the swim out. Blood weeps from the handle of the blade lodged into his back, too bright, too beautiful, a glorious shade that no pigment could truly replicate.

Beside him, she looks away from the face disappearing under reddening waters. She swims faster and harder, and swallows down the salt pooling on her tongue.

* * *

The mistake in camouflaging is to forget that it's not only sights that need masking, but _smells_.

The air fills with strange, inhuman sounds, clangs of a nearby skirmish as she lies motionless, hunkered down for the night. She used the environment as her toolkit, the landscape as her canvass till she blended in with the mud, moss, and trees. Katniss and Peeta and their deadly posse have not yet found her. They never once suspected, even when she was close enough to trip over – or at least kill them all in their sleep.

_Not a threat_. But one should never forget that she was once a victor of The Hunger Games.

Even the mutts don't notice her. Genetically designed to seek and destroy, and they don't notice her.

But she is always there, silent and still, waiting, just waiting for the right time to be of use, to give her life for District Twelve as she had sworn, to make amends for twenty-three pieces of life, the tributes to which she had never paid tribute.

The sounds draw nearer. She waits for the perfect opportunity.

_Her opportunity. _

Like lightning she lunges between the monkey's razor jaw and its mark.

Her only thought is that she's glad it is Peeta.

* * *

Gentle waves lick her skin, lap playfully over the sound of a painful gasping.

She tries.

But she can say nothing for the gaping holes in her throat, the blood filling her lungs. She gives up crucial air and receives nothing back for the effort. No bitter cries. No final, lingering words. Nothing but a wretched gasping, gasping, her face locking tight to the aching eyes of the boy who she was determined to save, the boy who, perhaps one day, could become the savior of them all, if she could only save him.

_I did._

Peace eases into her bones. A fatalistic darkness creeps into the margins of her vision. Color recedes. Fuzzy spots splish-splash over Peeta's face like flying specks of ink. _Fading_. But she has long enough to hear his calm voice comforting her, beckoning her eyes to the sky.

She looks up.

"Look at that."

_That_: A melody of light, a harmony of color and texture that greet her with open arms. Blood orange in long, wide swatches. Patches of honeyed amber. The rare burst of violet. And the soft blue of day chased by all these to the remotest edge of the horizon, a thinning line that holds back descending twilight like a cradle for the sky. The mounting grey sits heavy above, biding its time, ready to swoop down and usher in the pitch black night that she used to fear, while the clouds, soft and threadbare, drift lazily along, as if the turning of day to night is none of their concern.

"It's incredible isn't it? All those colors. Don't worry about anything else."

Mesmerized by her old friends, twenty-three fragments piece together like a scroll unfurling across the sky, and for the first time in twenty years she does not worry about anything else. Not the pain. Not the guilt. Not in finding a way to erase the old foes.

She lets them go. Twenty-three vivid faces dissolve into the dusk. New sources of color rush in to take their place. Now she sees sepia-tinted memories. In a bygone age she was a painter by trade. Years ago her father would say with a laugh, "You could capture the whole world with that brush of yours," and she would smile and reply, "but only if I could see the world, and every color in it." The same thought loiters now, and she recalls coating each train car with colors mixed by her very own hands, designs crafted by her very own mind, and the longing way she would watch them depart to the candy coated capitol, waving them with off with a tear and a smile like they were her very own children.

"I'll be right here with you. It's okay."

Through it all remains Peeta's columbine voice, his glacier colored eyes. She wonders what he will recall of this moment, what he will he make of her in these final seconds. What will he remember, she wonders, years later, when the tears and blood have dried and he has only his brush to tell the tales?

_What will he tell?_

Will he tell of the sunset over the beach? Or the exact shade of mud she had used to mask her face from sight? Or will the strokes be dark and angry and coarse, dipped in melancholy, decrying the moment when the horrid gasping stops?

She feels that in this baker maybe, just maybe, she's found a conduit for her stolen words, the things she will never get to say. The darkness in her eyes grows bolder and she dreams that he'll tell of her final thoughts, lazy and hushed, a slow running brook by the factory that the children would wade in after supper on purple summer nights bedazzled by fireflies.

_I'll be right here with you._

He'll tell of thoughts of grace, a placid, shining lake with water the color of his eyes and the warm press of his hand in her palm, for there is beauty even in death.

_It's okay._

She rests with a final thought of happiness, because Peeta lives, and he'll tell of twenty-four deaths that have not been in vain.

* * *

_Thanks for reading :)_


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